Film is Like a Battleground

Sam Fuller's War Movies

Marsha Gordon

Thoroughly illustrated with film stills, archival documents, and photographs from Fuller's personal collection

Film is Like a Battleground

Sam Fuller's War Movies

Marsha Gordon

Description

Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller's War Movies is the first book to focus on the genre that best defined the American director's career: the war film. It draws on previously unexplored archival materials, such as Fuller's Federal Bureau of Investigation files and WWII-era 16mm films, to explore the director's lifelong interest in making challenging, thought-provoking, and often politically dangerous movies about war.

After establishing the roots of Fuller's cinematographic schooling in the trenches during World War II, including careful consideration of his 16mm footage of a Nazi camp at the end of that war, Film is Like a Battleground explores Fuller's first forays into hot war representation in Hollywood with the pioneering Korean conflict films The Steel Helmet (1951) and Fixed Bayonets (1951). This pair of films introduced Fuller to his first run-ins with the American political machine when they triggered both FBI and Department of Defense investigations into his political sympathies and affiliations. Fuller's cold war films Pickup on South Street (1953) and, though it veers into hot war territory, Hell and High Water (1954) are Fuller's responses to the political pressures he had now personally experienced and resented. A chapter on Fuller's representation of pre-American-invasion Vietnam in China Gate (1957) alongside his unrealized Vietnam war screenplay, The Rifle (ca. late 1960s), illustrates the degree to which Fuller's representation of war and nation shifted even as he continued to probe war's impossible contradictions.

Film is Like a Battleground would be incomplete without a thorough exploration of the films depicting the war Fuller personally experienced and spent a lifetime contemplating, WWII. Verboten! (1959), Merrill's Marauder's (1962), and The Big Red One (1980) demonstrate Fuller's representation of a morally justifiable war. Fuller's 1959 CBS television pilot--Dogface--offers a glimpse at one of Fuller's failed attempts to bring his WWII story into American living rooms. The book concludes with a chapter about a documentary film made late in the director's life that returns Fuller to the actual site of the Nazi's Falkenau camp, at which he discusses his experiences there and that powerful, unforgettable footage he shot in the spring of 1945.

Film is Like a Battleground

Sam Fuller's War Movies

Marsha Gordon

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroductionCh 1: Sam Fuller's First War MovieCh 2: A Complicated Conflict: The Steel Helmet & Fixed Bayonets! Ch 3: Cold War Stories: Pickup on South Street and Hell and High Water Ch 4: More War in Asia: China Gate & The RifleCh 5: Looking Back at World War II: Verboten!, Dogface, & Merrill's Marauders Ch 6: Reimagining the War: The Big Red One Conclusion: Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Falkenau -- The Impossible BibliographyIndex

Film is Like a Battleground

Sam Fuller's War Movies

Marsha Gordon

Author Information

Dr. Marsha Gordon is Associate Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age, co-editor of Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film in the United States, and the former co-editor of The Moving Image journal.

Film is Like a Battleground

Sam Fuller's War Movies

Marsha Gordon

Reviews and Awards

"With clear thought, clear prose, and impeccable research, Marsha Gordon has written a fresh and insightful new edition to the study of major American stylist, Sam Fuller. Gordon thoroughly explores Fuller's war films, connecting them to archive records across a wide spectrum including his own personal experiences. This book is both important and readable." --JEANINE BASINGER, author of I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies

"Marsha Gordon's deft blend of biography, critical insight, and original argument makes this an exemplary study. Emphasizing the shaping experience of war in the life and art of Sam Fuller, Gordon finds a central tragic theme in the work of a director known mainly for his hyperbolic visual style. Important and timely, Film is Like a Battleground illuminates Fuller's career in a way that gives it immediate contemporary relevance." --ROBERT BURGOYNE, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History

"Marsha Gordon is a brilliant researcher and equally brilliant reader of films. Gordon takes Fuller's work and its contexts very seriously and sees them in a light that reveals what is so important about this neglected director." --ROBERT KOLKER, author of A Cinema of Loneliness

"Marsha Gordon's extraordinary study establishes war as the generative aspect of an entire career, in the way it provided the emotional and aesthetic valences of all of Sam Fuller's films and writing, and generative also of the director's combative relationships with studio bosses, journalists, and government bureaucrats. Film is Like a Battleground is a terrific cultural and critical biography of a great tough guy, iconoclast, and filmmaker." --ERIC SMOODIN, author of Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960

"It not only focuses on Fuller's war movies but brings hitherto unknown archive material to light resulting in that rare combination of stimulating critical insights and very relevant excavation...Using archival sources in an admirable and penetrating manner, Gordon succeeds in this project...Gordon's detailed researches into the Fuller archives often result in new discoveries...reviewing Fuller's legacy from another perspective to reveal its inherent humanity and relevance to an era in which we are again subject to the absurdity that Fuller earlier recognized." -- Film International

"In the engaging Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller's War Movies, Marsha Gordon explores how Fuller grappled with trauma, memory, and the impossibility of realistically representing war across his eight combat and Cold War films as well as his television and script work...Fuller was a master storyteller, and Gordon's meticulous research reorients and adds texture to many of the yarns he told not only about his films, but also about his own life...Gordon's focus allows her to provide sustained attention to individual pictures, interweaving discussion of their production and reception with detailed analysis of the films themselves and their political, cultural, and generic contexts." -- Film Quarterly

"Marsha Gordon's book on Fuller is part biography, part critical analysis, and it's eminently worth reading on both counts. Primarily she's engaged in making connections between Fuller's years with The Big Red One (aka the 1st Infantry Division) during World War II--the seminal experience of his life--and his filmmaking career...Gordon emerges with some stunning information...Gordon's book leaves no doubt that the war was the making of Fuller as an artist and he knew it while it was still happening." -- Film Comment